To learn more about modern software testing as a service we're joined by Jose Aracil, CEO of Globe Testing, based in the company's Berlin office. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Tell us about Globe Testing. Are you
strictly a testing organization? Do you do anything else? And how long
have you been in existence?

Aracil: We're a testing organization, and our services are around the Application Development Management (ADM) portfolio for HP Software. We work with tools such as HP LoadRunner, HP Quality Center,
HP Diagnostics, and so on. We've been around for four years now, although
most of our employees actually come from either HP Software or, back in
the day, from Mercury Interactive. So, you could say that we're the real
experts in this arena.

Gardner: Jose, what are
the big issues facing software developers today? Obviously, speed has
always been an issue and working quality into the process from start to
finish has always been important, but is there anything particularly new
or pressing about today's market when it comes to software development?

Scalability is key

Aracil:Scalability
is a big issue. These days, most of the cloud providers would say that
they can easily scale your instances, but for startups there are some
hidden costs. If you're not coding properly, if your code is not
properly optimized, the app might be able to scale -- but that’s going to
have a huge impact on your books.

Therefore, the return on investment (ROI)
when you're looking at HP Software is very clear. You work with the
toolset. You have proper services, such as Globe Testing. You optimize
your applications. And that’s going to make them cheaper to run in the
long term.

There
are also things such as response time. Customers are very impatient.
The old rule was that websites shouldn't take more than three seconds to
load, but these days it's one second. If it's not instant, you just go
and look for a different website. So response time is also something
that is very worrying for our customers.

Gardner:
So it sounds like cloud-first. We're talking about high scale,
availability, and performance, but not being able to anticipate what
that high scale might be in any given time. Therefore, creating a test
environment, where you can make the assumption that cloud performance is
going to be required and test against it, becomes all more important.

Aracil:
Definitely. You need to look at performance in two ways. The first one
is before the app goes into production in your environment. You need to
be able to optimize the code there and make sure that your code is
working properly and that the performance is up to your standard. Then,
you need to run a number of simulations to see how the application is
going to scale.

You might not reach the final numbers,
and obviously it's very expensive to have those staging environments.
You might not want to test with large numbers of users, but at least you
need to know how the app behaves whenever you increase the load by 20
percent, 50 percent, and so on.

The
second aspect that
you need to be looking at is when the app is in production. You can't
just go into production and forget about the app.

The second aspect that
you need to be looking at is when the app is in production. You can't
just go into production and forget about the app. You need to carry on
monitoring that app, make sure that you anticipate problems, and know
about those problems before your end users call to tell you that your
app is not up and running.

For both situations HP Software has different tools. You can count on HP Performance Center and HP Diagnostics when you're in preproduction in your staging environment. Once you go live, you have different toolsets such as AppPulse, for example, which can monitor your application constantly. It's available as software as a service (SaaS). So it's very well-suited for new startups that are coming out every day with very interesting pricing models.

Gardner:
You're based in Berlin, and that's a hotbed of startup activity in
Europe. Tell us what else is important to startups. I have to imagine
that mobile and being ready to produce an application that can run in a
variety of mobile environments is important, too.

Mobile is hot

Aracil:
Definitely. Mobile is very hot right now in Berlin. Most of the
startups we talk to are facing the same issue, which is compatibility.
They all want to support every single platform available. We're not only
talking about mobile and tablet devices,
but we're also talking about the smart TVs and the wide array of
systems that now should support the different applications that they're
developing.

So being able to test on multiple operating
systems and platforms and being able to automate as much as possible is
very important for them. They need the tools that are very flexible and
that can handle any given protocol. Again, HP Software, with things
such as Unified Functional Testing (UFT), can help them.

Mobile Center, which was just released from HP Software, is also very
interesting for startups and large enterprise as well, because we're
seeing the same need there. Banking, for example, an industry which is
usually very stable and very slow paced is also adopting mobile very
quickly. Everyone wants to check their bank accounts online using their iPad, iPhone, or Android
tablets and phones, and it needs to work on all of those.

Most
of the
startups we talk to are facing the same issue, which is compatibility.
They all want to support every single platform available.

Gardner:
Now going to those enterprise customers, they're concerned about mobile
of course, but they're also now more-and-more concerned about DevOps
and being able to tighten the relationship between their operating
environment and their test and development organizations. How do some of
these tools and approaches, particularly using testing as a service,
come to bear on helping organizations become better at DevOps?

Aracil:
DevOps is a very hot word these days. HP has come a long way. They're
producing lots of innovation, especially with the latest releases. They
not only need to take care of the testers like in the old days with
manual testing, automation, and test management. Now, you need to make
sure that whatever assets you're developing on pre-production can then
be reused when you go in production.

Just to give you
an example, with HP LoadRunner, the same scripts can be run in
production to make sure that the system is still up and running. That
also tightens the relationship between your Dev team and your Operations
team. They work together much more than they used to.

Gardner:
Okay, looking increasingly at performance and testing and development
in general as a service, how are these organizations, both the startups
and the enterprises, adapting to that? A lot of times cloud was
attractive early to developers, they could fire up environments,
virtualize environments, use them, shut them down, and be flexible. But
what about the testing for your organization? Do you rely on the cloud
entirely and how do you see that progressing?

Aracil:
To give you an example, customers want their applications tested in the
same way as real users would access them, which means they are
accessing them from the Internet. So it's not valid to test their
applications from inside the data center. You need to use the cloud. You need to access them from multiple locations. The old testing strategy isn't valid any more.

For
us, Globe Testing as a Service is very important. Right now, we're
providing customers with teams that are geographically distributed. They
can do things such as test automation remotely, and that can then be
sent to the customers so they are tested locally, and things such as
performance testing, which is run directly from the cloud in the same
way as users will do.

And you can choose multiple
locations, even simulating the kind of connections that these users are
using. So you can simulate a 3G connection, a Wi-Fi connection, and the
like.

Other trends

Gardner: I suppose other trends we're seeing are rapid iterations and microservices. The use of application programming interfaces (APIs)
is increasing. All of these, I think, are conducive
to to a cloud testing environment, so that you could be rapid and bring
in services. How is that working? How do you see your customers, and
maybe you can provide some examples to illustrate this, working toward
cloud-first, mobile-first and these more rapid innovations; even microservices?

Aracil: In the old days, most of the
testing was done from an end-to-end perspective. You would run a test
case that was heavily focused on the front end, and that would run the
end-to-end case. These days, for these kinds of customers that you
mentioned we're focusing on these services. We need to be able to
develop some of the scripts before the end services are up and running,
in which case things such as Service Virtualization from HP Software are very useful as well.

For example, one of our customers is Ticketmaster,
a large online retailer. They sell tickets for concerts. Whenever
there's a big gig happening in town, whenever one of these large bands
is showing up, tickets run out extremely quickly.

Their
platform goes from an average of hundreds of users a day to all of a
sudden thousands of users in a very short period of time. They need to
be able to scale very quickly to cope with that load. For that, we need
to test from the cloud and we need to test constantly on each one of
those little microservices to make sure that everything is going to
scale properly. For that, HP LoadRunner is the tool that we chose.

We
need to be able to
develop some of the scripts before the end services are up and
running.

Gardner:
Do you have any examples of companies that are doing Application
Development Management (ADM), that is to say more of an inclusive
complete application lifecycle approach? Are they thinking about this
holistically, making it a core competency for them? How does that help
them? Is there an economic benefit, in addition to some of these
technical benefits, when you adopt a full lifecycle approach to
development, test, and deployment?

Aracil: To
give you an example of economic benefit, we did a project for a very
large startup, where all their systems were cloud-based. We basically
used HP LoadRunner and HP Diagnostics to look at the code and try to
optimize it in conjunction with their development team. By optimizing
that code, they reduced the amount of cloud instances required by
one-third, which means a 33 percent savings on their monthly bill.
That’s straight savings, very important.

Another
example is large telecommunication company in Switzerland. Sometimes we
focus not only on the benefits for IT, but also the people that they are
actually using those services. For example those guys that go to their
retail shops to get a new iPhone or to activate a new contract.

If
the systems are not fast enough, sometimes you will see queues of
people, which turns into lower sales. If you optimize those systems,
that means that the agents are going to be able to process contracts
much quicker. This specific example will reduce to one-fifth of the time
by using Performance Center. That means that the following Christmas,
queues literally disappear from all those retail shops. That turns into
higher sales for the customer.

Gardner: Jose,
what about the future? What is of interest to you as a HP partner? You
mentioned the mobile test products and services. Is there anything else
particularly of interest, or anything on the big data side that you can
bring to bear on development or help developers make better use of
analytics?

Big data

Aracil:
There are a number of innovations that are coming out this year that are extremely interesting to us. These are things such as
HP AppPulse Mobile, StormRunner, both are new tools and they are very innovative.

When it
comes to big data, I'm very excited to see the next releases in the ALM
suite from HP, because I think they will make a very big use of big
data, and obviously they will try to get all the information, all the
data that testers are entering into the application from requirements.
The predictive test and the traceability will be much better handled by
this kind of big data system. I think we will need to wait a few more
months, but there are some new innovations coming out in that area as
well.Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Read a full transcriptor download a copy. Sponsor:HP.

The next BriefingsDirect best business practices panel discussion focuses on how Made in a Free World, a nonprofit group in San Francisco, is partnering with Ariba, an SAP
company, to shine more light across the supply chain networks to
not only stem these labor practices, but also reduce the risks that
companies may unwittingly incur from within their own pool of buying.

To
explain practical and effective approaches to forced-labor risk
determination and mitigation, we're joined by Tim Minahan, Senior Vice President of Ariba, and Justin Dillon, CEO and Founder at Made In A Free World in San Francisco. The panel is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Dillon:
I learned about this slavery issue about 10 years
ago, just reading an article in The New York Times, and
really wanted to figure out a way to get more people involved. That led to Made In A Free World, a nonprofit organization that was started just few years ago.

We began with consumers, just everyday
individuals getting involved and being able to leverage their own
network, their personal networks. That's now graduated into figuring out
how to get businesses to leverage their own networks.

Gardner:
What is the problem we are talking about? Is this just slavery? Is this
breaking the law in terms of other labor regulations?

Dillon: We define slavery as anyone who is being forced
to work without pay under threat of violence, being economically
exploited and unable to walk away. There are over 30 million people who
fall under that definition today. In some cases, these people find
themselves in the sex industry, but in most cases, they're in informal
sectors, agricultural or service industries, much of which is finding
its way into supply chains.

Part of what we believe is
that we have to find a way to be able to connect the dots and figure out
how we can use the systems that currently exist to protect the world's
most vulnerable resource.

Gardner: Tim, why is this becoming such an important issue now for nearly any business?

Minahan:
Over the past decade, as companies begin to outsource more processes
and manufacturing and assembly to low-cost regions, they've really
looked to drive costs down. Unfortunately, what they haven't done is
really take a close look at their sub-tier supply chain.

So they might have outsourced a process, but they
didn't outsource accountability for the fact that there may be forced
labor in their suppliers' suppliers. That's a real issue, getting that
transparency into that problem, understanding whether there's a
potential risk for the threat of forced labor in a sub-tier supply
chain.

Gardner: How big of a problem is this
in terms of scope, depth and prevalence? Is this something that happens
from time to time in rare instances or is this perhaps something that's
quite a bit more common than most people think?

Dillon:
It's really not a problem that “exists over there." Just one statistic
alone: By 2020, half of all the products you can purchase in a grocery
store will have a commodity, palm oil, which has a huge incidence of forced labor, particularly around the Malaysia region and Indonesia.

This
small commodity, mostly because it's so easy to pick and harvest, is
now finding its way into a myriad of products -- and that's just in
agriculture.

Gardner: Why
should companies be concerned? Isn’t that someone else's issue, if
it’s below the level of their immediate reach?

Minahan:
You can certainly outsource process or manufacturing, but you can’t
really outsource accountability. Secondly, there is a big movement afoot
from regulators, both here in the United States, Federal laws,
California state laws, as well as overseas in the UK to hold companies
accountable, not just for their first-tier supply chain, but for their
sub-tier supply chain.

Gardner: And, Justin, of course visibility being so prominent now -- a camera around every corner, social media -- people can easily react and irreparable damage to a company's
reputation. Do you have any examples of where this has come to bear,
where not knowing what's going on within your supply chain can be such
an issue economically and otherwise?

You can certainly outsource process or manufacturing, but you can’t really outsource accountability.

Dillon: Well, people love to hate the ones they love. So everyone is complaining about Apple products, while they're using their AppleiPhone. But in a recent article in The New York Times,
one of the supply-chain folks for Apple said that the days of sloppy
globalization is over and they're taking this quite seriously. I would
argue that some Apple's work is some of the most innovative human rights
work that we've seen.

They've dug deeper down into the sub-tier suppliers and, if their reputation as innovators has anything
to do with their products, it certainly has to do with their supply
chain as well. They are a great example of a company who sees these
challenges, sees the connection to not only their brand, but also to
their products and they're taking some remediation work against it.

Gardner:
Okay, we understand the depth of the issue and why it’s important. Now,
now how do we do get the tools to combat this effectively? What have
you done? I understand you have a database, and it’s ongoing. Tell me a
little bit about the tools that you’re bringing to bear to solve this
problem and to help companies take better accountability.

Dillon:
The most important thing to do first is to realize that we aren't operating in the 1990s anymore, in the sweatshop era.
That was an era that where we found problems in supply chains and we
started to build solutions around that, auditing, monitoring, all the
rest of that. That was 25 years ago.

Era of big data

We're
now in the 21st Century, in the era of big data, and we need to be able
to use those tools to be able to combat 21st Century problems. For us
as an organization, we've realized this was a space where we could be
helpful to business. Our mission is to use the free market to free
people. That’s what we do as an organization.

We've
realized that there is a lot of data missing, and there is a lot of
synthesis of data missing. So we, as an organization, decided to pull
together the bible of databases, when it comes to supply chains, the UNSPSC.
Then, we built off of that taxonomy a risk analysis on every single
thing good, service, or commodity that can be bought or sold. That
becomes the lingua franca, so to speak, when it comes to supply chain,
risk management.

Gardner: How does it work? When a company comes in and
gives you information about who their suppliers are, how do you come up
with inference, insight and some sort of a predictive capability that
identifies the risk or the probability that they could be in trouble?

Dillon:
We are using all the best databases that currently exist on the issue.
Everything from forced-labor databases to child-labor databases to
rule-of-law, governance, migration, trade flows. All of that is
synthesized into an algorithm that can be applied to any individual’s
spend data. You're able to get a dashboard on all that spend, which
gives you some optics into your sub-tier suppliers, which is where we
need the optics. It’s not a crystal ball, but it’s the next best thing.

That database and analysis are now available to anyone, any size, any sector, to leverage their influence
to the extent that they can. We've recognized that you can't be
everywhere at all times but you’re somewhere at some times and that's
the place we feel like any company can make the greatest influence.

That database and analysis are now available to anyone, any size, any
sector, to leverage their influence to the extent that they can.

Tell
us a little bit about how this particular risk fits into a larger risk
category, and then how the databases for each of them, or many of them,
come together for a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Minahan:
As Justin said, the information here is shining a light on a particular
issue, being able to mass, for the very first time, data points from
hundreds of different data sources around the world to predict and
project the threat of forced labor.

Extending that
further, that's one risk indicator that companies need to manage.
Companies are managing a whole host of sustainability issues around
social and eco-responsibility, but also financial risk, and threat of
disruption risk.

Being able to pull all those together
into a common risk factor is what we're attempting to do through the power of business networks. By connecting the world’s businesses and
connecting their supply chains and automating their processes, that was
phase one.

Phase two is harnessing all the information
from all of those interactions to provide a better level of visibility
that raises that transparency for everyone. Then, you can predict future
risk. Being able to tap into what Made In A Free World has done in this
particular area, pull that into the network, and expose that as another
risk factor that companies can evaluate is a very powerful opportunity
for us together.

Gardner: As we've seen in other
aspects of the networked economy, the better the data, the more
influence, the more action as a result of that data, that encourages
more people to see value and add more data back into the pool and so on
and so forth. Tell us about the news you made in April at the Ariba LIVE conference and
how that works into this notion of a virtuous adoption cycle.

New partnership

Minahan: Ariba and Made In A Free World announced a new partnership to bring the power of the Made In A Free
World database together for predictive analytics of forced labor with
the power of the Ariba toolset and the Ariba Network to help the Global 2000
and beyond be able to have the transparency they need to identify
potential risk, in this case, of forced labor and their supply chain,
and be able to take action and rectify it.

Gardner: Justin, how do you see this announcement benefiting your cause?

Dillon:
Well, it moves us past the point of saying there is nothing that you
can do as a company. That is no longer an option on the table. What
you're going to do is the next question. We have removed the word "if"
in this conversation -- and we couldn’t have done that without Ariba.

And we can see how the Ariba Network
is going to be helpful, because companies are coming to us and coming at the federal
government saying, "What are we supposed to do? How do we move forward?
This seems like a huge problem." They're right, and the solution is
right in front of them.

Gardner: Tim, for
organizations that are now more aware of this problem, and of the general
risk issue across supply chains, how do they start? Where do they go to
begin the process for getting better control that allows them to have
better accountability?

Minahan: That’s exactly
what Ariba and Made In A Free World are trying to do -- provide the
tools necessary for companies to get started. We mentioned together the
technical solution that we 're bringing to bear to allow folks within
the Ariba community to be able to access the Made In A Free World input
and be able to project potential issues of forced labor in their supply
chain.

Together, through that effort, we've developed a playbook that provides
suggested guidelines for folks to get started. You can’t fix what you don’t know about. You can’t improve
without having some understanding of where you fit in the mix. We
believe that data and doing an analysis on the freedom platform is the
best way for a company to get started.

We think it’s
the best synthesis of practices, data, influence, and the network effect
that anyone can begin to take. We suggest that they start to look at
their own risk based on what they are buying and based on their own
exposure. Every company that comes to us, we're able to do this risk
analysis with them, and they're are getting new insights.

In
addition, there is a whole ecosystem of companies that are really
looking at this issue hard. The thing that’s most exciting about it is
that everyone is very transparent and they're willing to share. So you
have companies from Patagonia to Apple and the like that are sharing
their practices freely, because this is an issue that we want to
address. The business world has the opportunity to address probably the
most serious issue facing us today, and that is modern slavery.

Learning more

We have every expectation that our partnership with Ariba is going to improve this tool, not just for us, but for the planet.

Gardner:
It strikes me that this is a game of numbers. If enough companies
examine their supply chain sufficiently and then eradicate the areas
where there is trouble, the almighty Dollar, Peso, or what currency it
may be, comes to bear, and things like corruption don’t work and bad
labor practices don’t get supported. Is this a rolling-thunder sort of
thing. If so, what’s the timeframe? Is this something that can be solved
in a fairly short amount of time if people actually come together and
work on it?

Dillon: To me, it’s the greatest
story ever told. This is the thing that we all appreciate, and frankly
we all benefit from it. We're all benefiting from a free market and the
way that we look at change in our organization is that we say that
change is more about judo than karate. How can we use the force against
itself to actually change it, and the marketplace is the way to do that.

So
yes, this can move quite quickly. In my opinion, it's much quicker than
governments can move. We think that they're going to be followers in
this case and we highly expect them to be followers.

Gardner:
Tim, if companies do this right, if they leverage big data, if they examine
risk properly, what do they get, other than of course the direct
reduction of that particular risk? It strikes me that we are not just
tackling risk, but we're putting into place systematic ability to manage
risk over time, which is way more powerful. Is that what we're going to
get?

Looking at risk

Minahan:
Absolutely. Companies are looking at risk holistically, and this is one
key vital input into that. As they continue to address that and, as
Justin said, we're using free markets as a powerful lever to free
people. They can, through their buying patterns and their buying
policies, begin to adjust the market, shine a light not just on their
own supply chain but change the sub-tier supply chain practices to make
sure that there is fair labor. It becomes unappealing to have forced
labor and it becomes a detriment to their ability to win new business by
doing that.

That's really what the power of data and the power of business networks can deliver in this scenario.

Dillon: Businesses are
the heroes in the story. It's not the non-profit, and it’s not
government. Anytime you associate business with human rights, businesses
are often qualified as Darth Vader who actually think that they are
Luke Skywalker in the story. And for us an Ariba, I don’t need to put
that on them, but we are just Yoda.

We're
giving them the tools that they need to fight the evil empire and we
are going to do it together and celebrate it together. But this is one
thing that we'll have to do in concert. We all have individual roles to
play, and business has a very clear, distinct role to play.